1. US media and Democratic Party enable Trump’s war of extermination against Iran
The US-Israeli assault has killed at least 1,255 people and wounded more than 12,000. Two hundred children are among the dead, including more than 170 killed by a Tomahawk missile that struck a girls’ school in Minab. The Iranian Red Crescent reported 19,734 civilian structures damaged, nearly doubling in 24 hours. This includes 77 healthcare centers and 69 schools.
This criminal war of aggression is systematically enabled by the media and the Democratic Party, whose leaders have endorsed the murder of Iranian officials, provided political cover for the Trump regime and funded the war. Not a single Democratic leader, not a single major newspaper editorial, has called the war what it is: a war crime and a “crime against peace” under the Nuremberg precedent, the very crime for which Nazi leaders were hanged.
Reflecting the general attitude of the Democratic Party-aligened media, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ most influential foreign affairs columnist, wrote Tuesday that the war’s initial results are “good for the Iranian people, given how many have been killed by the regime controlling that power, and it is good for the region.”
Friedman’s declaration that the outcome of the war is “good” is the endorsement of an unprovoked war of aggression in violation of international law. The murder of Iran’s head of state under the guise of negotiations is the crime of perfidy under the Geneva Conventions. The extermination of more than 170 children in a school is a war crime under the Rome Statute. The torpedoing of an unarmed vessel whose crew was left to drown is a violation of the Second Geneva Convention.
Friedman ignores every one of these crimes. His sole concern is tactical. The “transformation of Iran”—that is, overthrow of its government and the installation of a regime beholden to American imperialism—“is so much more important than the war’s critics admit, but so much more difficult than the war’s designers understand,” Friedman writes.
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On the broadcast networks and in the evening news, Trump’s genocidal statements are routinely passed over without comment—let alone condemnation—if they are reported at all. Threats to “end” Iran as a country and erase its very name are treated as just another soundbite, normalized as legitimate policy rather than exposed as incitement to mass murder.
The Democratic Party plays an even more direct role in enabling the war. The House Democratic leadership has endorsed the murder of Iran’s civilian leaders. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared on the Senate floor on March 2: “I will not shed a tear for Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, who was killed in the initial rounds of airstrikes.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared on Meet the Press last weekend that Iran’s leader “was a bad actor, and I’m not going to shed any tears as a result of his departure.”
Jeffries also signaled his openness to providing Trump with more money to wage the war: “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” The ritual is the same in every case: denounce Iran, praise the illegal murder of Iran’s civilian leadership, then complain about the process.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played her assigned role in the Trump administration’s war propaganda. On January 9—two days after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, in Minneapolis—she posted on X: “The Iranian government’s violent crackdown on demonstrators is horrific and must stop now.” At the Munich Security Conference in February, she repeated the administration’s claims that the Iranian government had killed “tens of thousands of people,” adding her voice to the propaganda barrage that preceded the attack on Iran.
On March 8, Ocasio-Cortez held a joint town hall in Glens Falls, New York, with Representative Pat Ryan, a former military intelligence officer and CIA Democrat whose career includes work for a Palantir subcontractor that proposed surveillance of left-wing activists. She did not mention the Iran war once.
The purpose of this massive propaganda onslaught is to combat and trample the mass popular opposition to the war. It underscores the fact that Trump is not acting as an isolated individual. He is the political representative of the capitalist oligarchy, which is resorting to the most criminal methods—war and extermination abroad, repression and dictatorship at home—to defend its wealth and global dominance.
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This is a war waged not only against the people of Iran, but against the working class in the United States and internationally. The fight against imperialist war is inseparable from the struggle to defend and extend the social and democratic rights of workers everywhere and to build an independent movement of the working class against the capitalist system that produces war, austerity and dictatorship.
The 750 Henry Ford Genesys Hospital nurses and case workers, who have been on strike in Grand Blanc, Michigan for six months, are under intense pressure by management, the Teamsters apparatus and government mediators to end their fight. This is happening as 10,000 Corewell Health nurses across Michigan vote on strike authorization over essentially the same issues of unsafe staffing and unbearable workloads.
The strike at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital began September 1, 2025, after the labor agreement expired in June and negotiations deadlocked over staffing ratios and pay. With federal and state mediators involved and no publicly announced tentative agreement, discussions are clearly focused on ending the walkout and orchestrating a return to work.
In recent days, Henry Ford has presented an “improved” contract package that includes pay raises—reported locally as up to 13 percent, with claims that some nurses will make over $100,000 a year—and provisions for strikers to return to work.
However, the offer does not guarantee that nurses will return to their original positions, units or shifts, since the hospital insists it can reassign them where “needed” because many positions have already been filled during the strike.
The central objective of the current talks revolves around how to shut down the strike, manage reentry of the workforce and stabilize operations after months of disruption. The talks between management and the Teamsters are not about meeting nurses’ core demands on staffing and working conditions.
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Throughout the strike, Henry Ford Health has pursued an aggressive policy of strikebreaking and workforce restructuring. The hospital has brought in replacement nurses—using agency staff and other outside hires—to maintain operations, while simultaneously offering permanent full‑time positions to non‑striking nurses to backfill the roles of those on the picket line.
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From the beginning, the courageous Genesys Hospital nurses have centered their fight on chronic understaffing, unsafe nurse‑to‑patient ratios and the erosion of patient care, alongside demands for higher pay to keep experienced staff from leaving. Nurses have described conditions in which they are routinely assigned more patients than they can safely care for, forced into exhausting overtime, and left without adequate support staff to handle complex caseloads.
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Recent offers from the hospital that have focused on wage increases without enforceable ratios or hiring commitments prove that the core issues in the strike have not been addressed. The ending of the strike would leave management’s control over staffing largely untouched.
While the determined fight of the Genesys Hospital strikers enters its sixth month, approximately 10,000 nurses across the Corewell Health system in Michigan have begun voting on whether to authorize a strike as they fight for their first ever contract.
These nurses, members of Teamsters Local 2024, have been in negotiations since June 2025. The strike authorization vote runs through mid‑March. Issues at Corewell include wages, just‑cause protections and a real grievance procedure, but the central concerns echo Genesys: safe staffing levels, protection from arbitrary discipline in a high‑pressure understaffed environment, and improvement that make it possible to provide safe, humane care at the bedside.
Corewell nurses are pushing back against workloads and scheduling practices that mirror those that drove Genesys nurses to strike, underscoring that these are system‑wide problems across Michigan healthcare, throughout the US and in fact the world.
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For six months, Teamsters Local 332 and the Teamsters International apparatus have kept the Genesys strike confined to one hospital, despite widespread support among workers and the existence of other Teamster‑organized healthcare workforces in Michigan. There has been no effort to mobilize the full Genesys workforce—technical, support and ancillary staff—or to organize solidarity actions by workers in the broader Henry Ford system or other Teamster‑organized facilities.
Instead, union officials have focused on sporadic negotiations, media events and appeals to Democratic Party politicians and government mediators, channeling the struggle into safe institutional channels while management has entrenched its position with replacements. Rank‑and‑file frustration is rife due to the lack of any strategy to expand the fight.
If Genesys nurses are on strike and actively seeking solidarity as Corewell nurses moved toward a walkout, it would pose the immediate question of a uniting 11,000 nurses and hospital workers in a single struggle over the same issues of staffing, wages and patient safety. The Teamsters leadership’s opposition to calls for coordinated action and its emphasis on separate bargaining tracks and limited, localized protests demonstrates how the union apparatus is the chief obstacle to broadening a working class offensive against the entire for‑profit healthcare system.
The World Socialist Web Site has consistently called on Genesys nurses and other hospital workers to form independent rank‑and‑file committees to take control of the struggle out of the hands of the Teamsters apparatus. Such committees would link the Genesys fight with healthcare workers at Corewell and other healthcare systems, such as Michigan Medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where there are 6,000 nurses.
The recent experiences of hospital workers in New York City, California and Hawaii have also shown that healthcare workers are in a life-and-death battle not only against the hospital chains and their wealthy backers but the pro‑corporate union apparatus that functions as their partner. In both cases, strikes that had been prepared and launched with widespread rank‑and‑file support were rapidly wound down or shut off by the bureaucracy, which moved to impose concessionary agreements and prevent the struggle from developing into a broader political confrontation with the government and the healthcare corporations.
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In the face of management’s strikebreaking and the Teamsters bureaucracy’s efforts to isolate and shut down the struggle, only an independent, rank‑and‑file‑led movement can unify Genesys and Corewell nurses, mobilize broader community and working class support, and fight for the social right to high‑quality, fully staffed healthcare for all.
3. Lessons of the 2026 New York City nurses strike
On January 12, 15,000 nurses in the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) went on strike against below-inflation wages, unsafe staffing levels, inadequate healthcare benefits and widespread workplace violence.
The strike won broad support among workers, students and more thoughtful middle-class layers, who are themselves confronting the rapid growth of inequality, which the deepening crisis in healthcare reflects. Taking place alongside a strike of 33,000 healthcare workers in California, it was part of a broader upsurge of the working class. It also coincided with mass demonstrations against the deployment of ICE to Minneapolis, where the question of a general strike against Trump became a topic of wide discussion.
But in spite of the powerful position nurses were in, the struggle was undermined by the NYSNA bureaucracy, which isolated the strike and shut it down after 41 days. Returning nurses now confront a management bent on retaliation and contracts that resolve none of the issues that drove them onto the picket lines.
The new agreements contain below-inflation wages, and health benefits so inadequate that many nurses cannot afford treatment in the units where they work. They include language on artificial intelligence that does nothing to prevent hospitals from replacing nurses with it. And the provisions on workplace violence are so weak that they merely call for committees to review violent incidents—after they have already occurred.
The struggle demonstrates, once again, that workers’ struggles against the corporate oligarchy requires at the same time a fight against the trade union apparatus, which is joined at the hip with management and the pro-capitalist Democratic and Republican parties.
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The conflict that emerged between the rank-and-file nurses and the NYSNA leadership was not simply the product of the personal decisions of individual officials, but the expression of opposed social interests of the union apparatus and the workers they claim to represent. The trade union bureaucracy has been transformed into an instrument for suppressing the class struggle and enforcing the dictates of the corporations and the state.
Behind the union bureaucracy stood the Democratic Party, which was hostile to the strike. Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency, allowing hospitals to bring in out-of-state scab nurses while denouncing the strike as a threat to patient care. When militant nurses marched on the governor’s mansion in Albany, the union leadership rushed to distance itself from the demonstration, making it clear they had not authorized it.
Throughout the strike, union officials arranged almost daily visits to the picket lines by low-level Democratic politicians who offered empty words of support through a bullhorn before fleeing the cold. Mayor and self-described “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani also appeared twice on the picket lines. But later at a demonstration, a dozen nurses protesting the contract were arrested by police.
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Throughout the strike, reporters for the World Socialist Web Site spoke with nurses on the picket lines, distributed articles and discussed the strategy needed to advance their struggle. Videos of these discussions circulated widely online, drawing hundreds of thousands of views. They allowed supporters of the strike to hear nurses’ demands and grievances, and relayed greetings of solidarity among workers in California, Minnesota and New York.
Two well-attended online meetings of rank-and-file nurses and healthcare workers were organized to discuss how the strike could be expanded and united with the struggles of healthcare workers and other sections of the working class confronting similar attacks. A statement issued at the first of these meetings declared:
“Healthcare workers defend life. When wealthy executives starve hospitals of staff and resources, they endanger patients; when the state kills a nurse in the streets, it signals that no one in the working class is safe from repression. Our struggle for staffing ratios, living wages and full benefits is inseparable from the defense of democratic rights.”
The central lesson of the strike is the need for a new strategy based on the independent organization of rank-and-file nurses. Control of the struggle must be taken out of the hands of the union bureaucracy and placed in organizations democratically run by workers themselves. Such organizations must seek to expand the fight beyond individual hospitals, uniting nurses with healthcare workers and other sections of the working class confronting layoffs, austerity and repression.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees is fighting to build this movement on a world scale. In the United Auto Workers, Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman is running for president on an insurgent platform to transfer power from the pro-corporate union apparatus to rank-and-file workers themselves.
Above all, the struggle must reject the claim that the needs of patients and healthcare workers must be subordinated to the profits of hospital systems and their billionaire trustees. Healthcare is a social right, and its defense requires the political independence of the working class from both corporate parties.
4. The Dutch ruling elite, its royals, and the war against Iran
The eruption of war against Iran, and the rapid and fascistic character in its unraveling course, has demolished any pretense of “neutrality” or “restraint” in Dutch bourgeois politics, revealing how swiftly the new minority cabinet of Prime Minister Rob Jetten, Democrats 66 (D66), aligns itself with the interests of international capital, imperialist powers and their predatory wars.
Public political sentiment in the Netherlands, by contrast, reflects mounting anti-war opposition. A recent RTL Nieuws poll revealed that a majority fears the escalation of the war into a third world war involving the Netherlands itself. Yet the Jetten cabinet, taking office just five days before the bombing of Iran, not only signaled support for a war of annihilation against Iran, but has also accelerated its plans to expand the Dutch military.
This dual dynamic—growing mass opposition from below confronted by an almost unanimous warmongering consensus above—reveals the ever-widening and irreconcilable gulf between the working class and the entire bourgeois political establishment as seen internationally.
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Through collaborations with France, the Dutch military seeks to gain “operational experience” in the planning and execution of nuclear war, despite possessing no arsenal of its own. “This is the role that the Netherlands must play,” Jetten boasted. “We must look for clever coalitions which serve Dutch interests and strengthen Europe,” he further emphasized.
The drive for a specifically European nuclear deterrent grows more insistent as trade and strategic frictions between Europe and the United States intensify. Each turn of the global crisis pushes Europe’s ruling classes—including the Dutch bourgeoisie—toward asserting their own imperial interests under the misleading slogan of “strategic autonomy.”
At his weekly press briefing, as the Dutch frigate HNLMS Evertsen departed to “protect” a French aircraft carrier to the Gulf without full cabinet approval, Jetten warned of potential casualties: “The Dutch frigate is well capable of intercepting projectiles from the air.” In plain terms, the Netherlands is prepared to engage Iran militarily—placing itself on the front line of this widening war.
Facing widespread public opposition—and in many quarters open hostility—toward its plans to expand the armed forces from 80,000 to 122,000 personnel, with possible expansion to 200,000, the Jetten government has turned recruitment for war into a spectacle. In coordination with the Ministry of Defense, the corporate media have launched a nationwide recruitment campaign to glorify the military, with the monarchy playing a starring role.
Only weeks before the bombardment of Iran began, Queen Máxima announced she had enlisted as a reservist in the Royal Netherlands Army. At 54, she appeared in camouflage, trading silk and ceremony for khaki and combat drills. The Ministry of Defense claimed this was a personal response to new “security concerns”: “Because the security of the Netherlands can no longer be taken for granted, Máxima has decided to become a reservist.”
Her choreographed appearances—grinning from armored vehicles and drilling with soldiers—are not just pompous publicity stunts but acts of calculated political theater. A Defense Ministry spokesman boasted, “We are very proud that she is doing this and hope other people will think, ‘Hey, this is something I could do.’”
In a society where confidence in parliament, its affiliated institutions, the established political parties, affiliated trade unions, and its pseudo-left appendages—part and parcel with the corporate media—has all but collapsed, the monarchy functions as one of the ruling class’s last refuges of manufactured legitimacy. The ruling elite, in turn, safeguards the monarchy as a vital ideological instrument. It alone can drape nationalist chauvinism and militarism in the language of “unity, tradition and home-grown virtue.”
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The policies of the Dutch government are one link in the global chain of capitalist crisis. The transformation of the Jetten cabinet into a de facto war government, as seen at other European centres, expresses the logic of European capitalism as a whole. Confronted with stagnation, intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry and growing social unrest, the bourgeoisie turns outward—to militarism—and inward—to repression.
These measures are already arousing anger among workers and youth. Strikes and protests originally centred on wages, housing and climate issues are acquiring a consciously political, anti-war character. Yet this mass opposition collides with the absence of revolutionary leadership. The so-called “Dutch left”—PvdA, GroenLinks, Socialist Party and the trade-union bureaucracy—long ago integrated themselves into the state and NATO’s command structure. Their hollow appeals for “dialogue” and “diplomacy” merely disguise their acceptance of imperialist policy.
The leaders of the main trade union confederations—such as FNV, CNV, as well as VCP—have met with cabinet ministers, warning that strikes will be unavoidable unless plans to delay retirement and cuts to unemployment benefits are withdrawn. Their own statements, however, underscore the volatility of the situation: mass demonstrations are again expected in The Hague and in Amsterdam, the same cities where hundreds of thousands rallied against the genocide in Gaza.
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The US-led war against Iran is the latest chapter in a 35-year trajectory of imperialist interventions across the Middle East, carried out to control energy routes, strategic chokepoints and resources as part of a broader strategy to contain Russia and China. It forms part of a global plan for US hegemony, using the Middle East’s resources as tools of coercion against both rivals and its “allies” in Europe.
The workers and youth of the Netherlands must draw the necessary political conclusions from this political reality and from their historical experiences. Genuine opposition to war is inseparable from opposition to the capitalist system that breeds it. The struggle against the bombardment of Iran, NATO’s drive toward nuclear confrontation with Russia, and the social attacks at home must be waged as a unified fight—through the independent mobilization of the Dutch working class as part of the European and international working class under a socialist program.
5. Blind in the right eye – Prosecution – and a documentary about German dramatist Einar Schleef
In an interview, the film’s young director correctly noted: “We can’t really understand the German judicial system without taking its Nazi past into account."
In an interview, Faraz Shariat, the film’s young director, quite correctly noted: “We can’t really understand the German judicial system without taking its Nazi past into account. Many problems stem from the fact that total de-nazification of society has never taken place.”
The phrase “the German state is blind in the right eye” first emerged following the persecution of political opponents of the Weimar Republic. Laws introduced following a wave of ultra-right violence and murders were used mainly to prosecute left-wing political activists.
According to statistics gathered between 1919–22, out of a total of 354 right-wing assassins, only 24 convictions were made. None of the convicted were executed and the average sentence served was four months.
On the other hand, only 22 leftists were identified as involved in murders. Yet 38 were convicted! Ten were executed and the average prison term served was 15 years.
Furthermore, in 1972, the Radikalenerlass (“Radicals Decree”) to combat political extremism introduced by the Social Democratic government of Willy Brandt was largely used to prosecute and punish leftists.
In the form of a thriller, Prosecution makes the case that this bias on the part of the German state continues to this day. In the last federal election, the extreme right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won over 20 percent of the vote and emerged as the main opposition party in parliament. Tackling the growth of the far right is impossible without tackling its supporters inside the German state—and German capitalism as a whole.
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The painter, playwright and director Einar Schleef is often mentioned in the same breath as filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder as one of the outstanding artistic figures in postwar Germany. A new documentary with the clumsy English title No Germany Did I Find [the German is Einar Schleef–Ich habe kein Deutschland gefunden], directed by Sandra Prechtel, featured at the recent Berlinale. It contains fascinating material relating to the life and work of Schleef who was born in East Germany (GDR) at the end of World War II.
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In the notes for her documentary, director Prechtel writes: “Theaters should burn after every performance, says Schleef. This is not a call for violence, it is Schleef’s seriousness with which he does everything he can to shake people out of their lethargy. Out of their insensitivity. [For him] Art must not be an escape from reality, it must be an escape into reality, in all its harshness.”
Cultural life was suffocating in the Stalinist GDR where creative work was subject to the veto of bone-headed bureaucrats—and Schleef was not prepared to make compromises. Declaring his disenchantment with the stifling bureaucracy in the East, Schleef moved to Frankfurt in West Germany in the 1980s and began work on plays based on Greek classics.
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Having turned his back on the Stalinist East, Schleef also felt uneasy in the capitalist West. In 1989-90, he was one of the few artists to recognize the significance of the transformation of the universalist slogan used by East German workers in their demonstrations against the Stalinist system–“We are the People”–into “We are One People,” i.e., the nationalist slogan introduced by leading Stalinist politicians to ease the integration of East Germany into West German capitalism.
For Schleef, the return of a united capitalist Germany represented a dangerous Pandora’s box which, when opened, could once again unleash the horrors of the country’s not-too-distant Nazi past.
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Schleef died relatively young, at the age of 57. At the centre of this new documentary, his own commentaries are interspersed with observations from many of those who worked alongside him and who praise his sensitivity and insight.
Despite the immense difficulties he confronted in his life, there is not the slightest hint of self-pity on his part and, to her credit, Prechtel has avoided any attempt to reduce her film merely to a psychological portrait. Her documentary is a fitting tribute to a leading figure in postwar German theater.
6. The COVID-19 pandemic at 6 years: Mass death, debilitation and media silence
Six years ago this week, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the global outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic. In the six years since, the pandemic has killed over 30 million people worldwide, left more than 400 million suffering from Long COVID and inflicted incalculable damage on the social fabric of every country on Earth. It is one of the most catastrophic events in modern history—and it is not over.
Yet not a single major bourgeois publication has so much as acknowledged this anniversary. The pandemic has been deliberately erased from public consciousness by the political establishment, even as the virus continues to spread, disable and kill on a mass scale. In May 2023, under pressure from the Biden administration, the WHO prematurely ended the Public Health Emergency of International Concern, offering political cover for capitalist governments globally to scrap remaining public health measures. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic remains a serious and deadly ongoing threat whose cumulative toll grows with each passing week.
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The normalization of mass death from COVID-19 is of a piece with the broader social barbarism overseen by the same ruling elites. The capitalist governments that have condemned millions to death through “forever COVID” are the same that have enabled and armed the genocide in Gaza and now the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran. The Trump administration’s fascistic assault on public health—accelerated by Kennedy’s demolition of the remaining public health infrastructure—is part of a broader program of social reaction that includes the destruction of all climate change mitigation policies, which in turn fosters the conditions for future pandemics through habitat destruction, zoonotic spillover and the weakening of global health systems. The world is now less prepared for the next pandemic than it was in 2020.
The World Socialist Web Site stands alone in providing continuous, scientifically grounded coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic from the standpoint of the international working class. Since January 2020, the WSWS has published over 5,000 articles on the pandemic—the only publication outside of scientific journals to have covered the science and politics of COVID with this depth and consistency.
One year ago, the WSWS marked the five-year anniversary of the pandemic with a comprehensive series analyzing the origins of the social catastrophe and the unique record of the WSWS in opposing it. The Global Workers’ Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic, launched in November 2021, continues to document the testimonies of workers, scientists and public health experts from around the world.
As we have stressed from the very beginning, the defense of science, the restoration of public health infrastructure and the end of the pandemic require the independent political mobilization of the international working class to fight for a socialist reorganization of society.
7. US and Ecuadorian militaries burn homes and torture workers in “Operation Total Extermination”
The US-Ecuadorian joint military operation launched March 3, ostensibly against drug cartels, has turned Ecuador into a proving ground for unleashing military violence upon every country in the hemisphere in furtherance of US hegemony.
Neither the Pentagon nor the Ecuadorian Ministry of Defense, which has dubbed the onslaught “Operation Total Extermination,” have reported casualty figures.
Subsequent reports, however, have made clear that the Pentagon and Ecuadorian forces are following a scorched-earth policy aimed not at cartels but civilians, akin to that employed by the military dictatorships in Central and South America over the last century.
Last Friday, the Ecuadorian Armed Forces boasted on social media that “Ecuador and the US destroyed” the training grounds and a vacation home of the Border Commands—a drug trafficking group formed by former Colombian FARC-EP guerrilla fighters along the Colombian-Ecuadorian border.
The announcement included aerial videos showing military helicopters bombing rural properties and rustic homes in the northeast town of Santa Rosa, Sucumbíos Province. “During the subsequent search, weapons and other evidence linked to illegal activities were found,” the publication claims.
The US Southern Command, the branch of the US armed forces that oversees forces in Latin America, issued an accompanying statement indicating the US and Ecuador had launched “lethal kinetic operations against Designated Terrorist Organizations.”
Sean Parnell, chief Pentagon spokesman, added: “At the request of Ecuador, the Department of War executed targeted action to advance our shared objective of dismantling narco-terrorist networks.”
The following day, Saturday, President Daniel Noboa shook hands with Donald Trump at the “Shield of the Americas Summit” in Miami, where the fascist American president announced a “brand new military coalition” against drug cartels. “The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our militaries,” he declared.
To capture drug traffickers, Trump might have simply called for the arrest of Noboa himself, whose billionaire family’s Noboa Trading Co. has been caught shipping cocaine to the Balkans in crates with bananas sold under the Bonita label.
Instead, in real time, the true character of this coalition was shown in Sucumbíos, where local news reporters were informing Saturday that the US and Ecuadorian militaries had bombed the homes of peasants and small farmers and tortured agricultural workers who deny any illegal activities.
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Under the pretext of fighting “narco-terrorists,” US imperialism and its stooges are deliberately sowing terror.
Radio Sucumbíos published a video of the total destruction of an impoverished home in San Martín, reporting that the town was left “war-torn.”
None of the international news media have mentioned what happened in San Martin in their reporting of the joint operation, and it is still unclear from media reports how many people have been killed.
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As noted by the World Socialist Web Site, the “Shield of the Americas” summit in Miami has as its closest historical precedent the November 1975 summit in Pinochet’s Chile, where intelligence officials of South America’s dictatorships launched “Operation Condor,” named after Chile’s national bird. This network coordinated the detention, torture and killings of suspected leftists with the assistance of the CIA.
The Ecuadorian military, which would later join Operation Condor, and their US handlers are now relaunching their network of terror.
The Trump administration undoubtedly expects that the turmoil generated by the unraveling economic and military wars launched by US imperialism, now leading to skyrocketing oil prices, will lead to explosive social protests across Latin America akin to those that erupted during the 1970s oil shocks. In response, they seek to terrorize the population and set up dictatorships before a popular upheaval.
The methods of landing helicopters in rural communities, burning and bombing homes, capturing and torturing their inhabitants recall the types of attacks and massacres carried out by these dictatorships to kill hundreds of thousands across South and Central America, but this time replacing the charge of “Communists” with that of “Narco-terrorists.” In many cases, these dictatorships and the CIA worked closely with the drug cartels.
As recently as March 2022, the Colombian military massacred 11 people, including the indigenous governor and another local leader, at a peasant bazaar in Putumayo, claiming that they belonged to the same Border Command targeted in Ecuador. While this took place under the far-right Iván Duque administration, the current pseudo-leftist President Gustavo Petro has joined the fray, announcing a joint operation with Ecuador and the US, with 20,000 Colombian troops deploying to the border in collaboration with “Operation Total Extermination.”
Ecuador serves only as the test case. This terror is no aberration but the logical outgrowth of US imperialism’s global war drive, from Iran’s annihilation to the starvation of Cuba, the bombing of Caracas and kidnapping of the Venezuelan president.
8. United Kingdom: Labour’s SEND “reform”: an austerity-driven attack on vulnerable children
Britain’s Labour government released its Schools White Paper on February 23, titled, “Every Child Achieving and Thriving”. Central to the policies outlined is the section detailing Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) Reform.
As with the government’s other “reforms,” the term has been turned on its head to describe a pro-market agenda—whether justifying further privatization in the National Health Service (NHS) or the downgrading of the mail service—and this applies equally to the deepened erosion of public education.
The White Paper proposes an overhaul of the rights of children with SEND to access education over the next decade. Stripped of the jargon of “inclusion” and “equality for all,” the measures will remove the statutory right of hundreds of thousands of children to receive necessary support, slash funding, and offload SEND provision onto cash-strapped schools and exhausted teachers.
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The White Paper trailed months of media reports claiming councils face bankruptcy due to SEND overspending. What these omit is that central government grants to local authorities have been cut by half since 2010, forcing a constant slash-and-burn of public provision and the sell-off of public assets to the private sector, which has leeched billions through the contracting out of local services.
A survey published days before the White Paper found that of 87 councils responding, 69 warned they faced insolvency if required to repay SEND debts built up over years of overspending.
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Many core elements of the reforms have been postponed until the next parliament, as ministers attempt to defuse anger among parent campaigners who recognize the measures as austerity imposed on the most vulnerable. This follows Labour’s broader agenda of welfare cuts and measures aimed at forcing disabled people into jobs that do not exist.
Phillipson cited the achievement gap between SEND and non-SEND pupils. But this is the product of systematic cuts to education budgets totaling around £60 billion in real terms over the past decade.
One in three children have special needs at some point in their schooling. More than half (51.6 percent) of pupils who fail to meet Key Stage 2 expectations in reading, writing and maths have been identified with special needs by the end of that stage.
In January 2025, 638,700 children and young people had an active EHCP—an increase of 10.8 percent from January 2024. Since the 2014 reforms introducing EHCPs, the number has doubled, including a 30 percent increase among children under five since 2023.
The rise is driven primarily by Autism Spectrum Disorders, Social, Emotional and Mental Health needs, and Speech, Language and Communication Needs. Meanwhile, the number of pupils with Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties or Severe Learning Difficulties—those most likely to require specialist schools—has remained largely unchanged.
The increased demand for EHCPs has not developed in a vacuum. The criminal policy of placing profit over public health during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the thousands of children who lost a parent—around 2 million who suffer from Long COVID—worsening mental health and rising child poverty have had a devastating impact on children.
The education unions have been complicit in the systematic decline in education funding, the expansion of privatization and the erosion of working conditions. They have repeatedly blocked strike mandates by teachers seeking to defend their conditions and oppose below-inflation pay settlements.
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The education unions have all “cautiously welcomed” the reforms announced by Phillipson, with the condition that they “don’t go far enough” and more funding is needed. They will not mobilize their membership for a properly funded education system, having promoted Labour as an alternative to more than a decade of austerity under the Conservatives.
The defense of education for all and decent wages and conditions for teachers can only happen through an independent rank-and-file opposition of teachers united with broader sections of workers against austerity, the attack on democratic rights and the subordination of all needs to the profit system.
9. China’s five-year plan doubles down on hi-tech to counter US threat
The latest Chinese five-year plan released earlier this month, and the work report presented to the National People’s Congress last week underscore that the economic policy of the Xi Jinping regime is being driven by the threats posed by the US.
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Critics of the regime’s economic policy, both externally and within China have repeatedly declared that the road to higher growth lies in boosting the domestic economy, particularly by lifting consumption spending. This should be done by expanding social service spending and by cleaning up the collapse of the property market which acts as a dead weight on consumers.
But that path has been by and large rejected, apart from some marginal changes, because the focus is on the further development of high tech and artificial intelligence.
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Apart from the threat to oil supplies, the chaos being unleashed in the Middle East threatens to disrupt what has been a central objective of Beijing, that is, to strengthen its economic and political ties with this region, through increased exports, loans and investments.
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The priorities are clear in the five-year plan. Boosting the domestic economy ranks fourth behind building modern industries, achieving technological self-reliance, and digitizing the economy—one place lower than in the previous five-year plan. Developing AI is mentioned 50 times in the 141-page document.
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Fred Neumann chief Asia economist at HSBC said: “China’s government remains laser-focused on spurring technological breakthroughs and high-tech investment. In part, this is motivated by competition with the United States for control over the technologies of the future.”
10. US memo exposes Sri Lankan “humanitarian” posturing over Iranian sailors’ rescue
On March 4, a US submarine torpedoed and sank the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena near Sri Lankan waters, killing 108 sailors on board. The attack without warning occurred in international waters as the vessel was returning from multinational naval exercises hosted by India.
This act of mass murder, thousands of kilometres from the Middle East, was part of Washington’s escalating war against Iran. It sent an unmistakable message: the conflict will be prosecuted wherever the US chooses, unconstrained by international law or convention.
The Sri Lankan Navy responded to two distress calls early in the morning—at 4 a.m. and 5 a.m.—from the sinking Iranian vessel and rescued 32 survivors, who were admitted to Karapitiya Hospital in Galle for treatment. The navy later retrieved the bodies of dozens of sailors from the sunken ship.
On March 4, a second Iranian naval ship, IRIS Bushehr, carrying 208 crew members, sent a message to the Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry requesting permission to enter Colombo Port. After initially rejecting the request, the nervous Sri Lankan government, after a flurry of diplomatic discussions, finally allowed the ship into Colombo Port on March 5. Its crew were disembarked and the vessel taken to Trincomalee Port on the other side of the country.
That night, in a special media briefing, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake claimed that his government had acted in a manner that “safeguards the dignity of the country.” It did not take a “hasty decision,” he said, because “this concerns a naval vessel belonging to one party in a war,” and “we are a neutral state.”
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Dissanayake acknowledged that discussions had been held with “relevant embassies” but did not identify them. He declared that Sri Lanka had agreed to take custody of the crew and vessel, “subject to agreements and understandings reached between the parties,” but likewise did not identify the parties, or the terms of the agreements.
In other words, Dissanayake presented the episode as a routine humanitarian operation carried out by a neutral state and was praised by the media and opposition parties for showing restraint.
That narrative has now been shattered by a Reuters report, posted on March 7, shedding light on what led the Sri Lankan government to allow the second ship into the country.
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Dissanayake’s posturing about Sri Lanka’s “neutrality” and “humanitarian mission” is false to the core. At an International Women’s Day event in Colombo, he boasted that Sri Lanka “carries the banner of humanity forward,” while other countries wage war.
In reality, the Dissanayake government functioned as a compliant intermediary for the diplomatic and strategic objectives of the US and Israel as dictated by their diplomatic envoys. The events surrounding the sinking of the Dena expose the complicity of Colombo—and New Delhi—in the imperialist war being waged against Iran.
Three Iranian ships—IRIS Lavan, IRIS Dena, and IRIS Bushehr—had recently participated in multinational naval exercises hosted by India in the Bay of Bengal. After the drills, on February 27, these vessels sought permission to make a courtesy port call in Colombo. That request was refused.
Neither New Delhi nor Colombo has condemned the US attack on the Dena or the killing of its crew, or the illegal war itself. Their silence is not accidental. Both governments are politically aligned with Washington and are increasingly integrated into its military and strategic framework in the Indo-Pacific as it prepares for war with China.
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Colombo’s role in the Iran war also sheds light on the political character of the government and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) that leads it. The JVP, a petty bourgeois organization based on Maoism, Castroism and the armed struggle that routinely engaged in anti-imperialist and socialistic demagogy, has evolved into a flunky of US imperialism and international finance capital.
At home, the Dissanayake administration, which claims to defend “humanity” abroad, is ruthlessly imposing International Monetary Fund austerity policies driving millions deeper into poverty. To enforce these measures, Dissanayake is expanding the powers of the police and military and using the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act, Emergency Regulations and the Essential Services law to suppress the opposition of workers and the rural poor.
The sinking of IRIS Dena as part of the devastating war on Iran is another warning that US imperialism is plunging the world towards catastrophe as it engages in a reckless attempt to reassert global domination. The ruling classes in India and Sri Lanka, have aligned themselves with this neo-colonial agenda. The only social force capable of stopping this descent into barbarism is the international working class.
Australian military personnel were aboard the US submarine that torpedoed and sank the unarmed IRIS Dena in international waters, killing 140 sailors in a war crime. Yesterday, Australia’s participation became open, with Labor announcing the deployment of missiles, a warplane and personnel to join in a war aimed at regime-change and the annihilation of Iranian society.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) has been campaigning on university campuses against the war, exposing Labor’s role, warning of the preparations for even greater crimes in the US-led confrontations with Russia and China and putting forward a socialist and revolutionary perspective to halt capitalism’s descent into barbarism. The IYSSE is holding a series of meetings at university campuses opposing the war.
12. Germany: SPD vote collapses in the Baden-Württemberg state elections
The collapse of the SPD is all the more remarkable given that the election took place against the backdrop of a catastrophic industrial decline and the criminal US war against Iran. While social crises and wars usually strengthen nominally left-wing parties, the opposite was the case this time. The former workers’ party, the SPD, has moved so far to the right that it is no longer perceived as the solution to the problems, but the cause.
The same applies to the Left Party. With 4.4 percent, it once again failed to enter the state parliament. Although its vote slightly improved compared to the last state election, it remained significantly below its Baden-Württemberg federal election result of 6.8 percent. Together, the SPD and the Left Party did not even account for 10 percent of the votes cast.
The issues of war and job losses are impelling millions of voters. Yet the election offered them no opportunity to provide an answer to this. The establishment parties all support the massive rearmament of the Bundeswehr (armed forces), the war against Russia in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza and the war against Iran. The differences between them on these issues are minimal.
They all give the same answer to the jobs massacre in the car and metal industries: elimination of health and safety at work, more speed-ups and lower taxes to save corporate profits at the expense of jobs. The trade unions, which are closely linked to the SPD and the Left Party, sabotage and suppress any resistance to dismissals in the factories—as at Bosch in Schwäbisch Gmünd, where they are preventing an influential opposition list from participating in the works council election.
At the federal level, the SPD, together with the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), initiated “special funds” and loans totaling over €1 trillion to upgrade the Bundeswehr into Europe’s strongest armed force, and passed them with the help of the Greens. The Left Party also voted in favour of the war credits in the Bundesrat (second chamber of parliament) to demonstrate that its occasional pacifist phrases are not to be taken seriously.
The aims of the criminal war against Iran are supported by all the establishment parties. Left Party leader Jan van Aken welcomed the treacherous assassination of Iranian head of state Khamenei with the words: “May he rot in hell.” A different attitude prevails among the population. According to the latest ARD-DeutschlandTrend poll, 58 percent of respondents oppose the war against Iran, with only 25 percent considering it justified. Seventy-seven percent view the political situation in the world with concern.
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The only party that was able to profit from the growing frustration and suppressed indignation is the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD). It received over 1 million votes in Baden-Württemberg for the first time and, with 18.8 percent, was able to almost double its result from the last state election. According to pollsters infratest dimap, the AfD achieved its highest share of the vote among workers, at 37 percent. The comparable figure for the SPD was only 5 percent, and for the Left Party 4 percent.
The AfD and its lead candidate Markus Frohnmaier undoubtedly bear fascist traits, but they do not lead a mass fascist movement as Hitler and Mussolini did. The votes for the AfD are an expression of widespread frustration, which manifests itself in reactionary forms because it cannot find a progressive avenue. The dissatisfaction is much broader than the AfD’s voter base. Many despise the right-wing extremists and hold their noses to vote for an establishment party because they see no other way to keep the AfD out of government.
This explains the election result in Baden-Württemberg, which ostensibly leaves everything as it was. As in the past 10 years, the Greens and the CDU will govern the state together. They even have a two-thirds majority in the state parliament, since numerous parties—including, for the first time, the Liberal Democratic Party (FDP)—failed to clear the 5 percent hurdle. Almost 16 percent of the votes cast are therefore unrepresented in the state parliament.
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The Özdemir government in Stuttgart is inevitably heading for a confrontation with the working class. But the latter needs a progressive perspective. The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) has consistently warned against the illusion that the Left Party, the trade unions or even the SPD could be moved to adopt policies in the interests of the working class. This illusion, propagated by pseudo-left organizations, leads to a dead end. The result of the state election in Baden-Württemberg has demonstrated this once again.
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
